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        <section class="chapter">
    
            <h1>Chapitre 1</h1>
    
            <p>For four centuries the noise of controversy has raged round
                the cradle of Typography. Volumes have been written,
                lives have been spent, fortunes have been wasted, communities
                have been stirred, societies have been organised,
                a literature has been developed, to find an answer to the
                famous triple question: “When, where, and by whom
                was found out the unspeakably useful art of printing
                books?” And yet the world to-day is little nearer a
                finite answer to the question than it was when Ulric Zel indited his memorable
                narrative to the <em>Cologne Chronicle</em> in 1499. Indeed, the dust of battle has added
                to, rather than diminished, the mysterious clouds which envelope the problem,
                and we are tempted to seek refuge in an agnosticism which almost refuses to
                believe that printing ever had an inventor.</p>
    
            <p>It would be neither suitable nor profitable to encumber an investigation of
                that part of the History of Typography which relates to the types and type-making
                of the fifteenth century by any attempt to discuss the vexed question of
                the Invention of the Art. The man who invented Typography was doubtless
                the man who invented movable types. Where the one is discovered, we have
                also found the other. But, meanwhile, it is possible to avail ourselves of
                whatever evidence exists as to the nature of the types he and his successors used,
                and as to the methods by which those types were produced,
                and possibly to arrive at some conclusions respecting the earliest practices of the
                Art of Typefounding
                in the land and in the age in which it first saw the light.</p>
    
            <p>No one has done more to clear the way for a free
                investigation of all questions relating to the origin
                of printing than Dr. Van der Linde, in his able essay,
                <em>The Haarlem Legend</em>,
                <span class="footnote" data-note="01" id="note-01"><em>The Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing by
                        Lourens Janszoon Coster, critically examined.</em> From the Dutch by J.
                    H. Hessels, with an introduction and classified list of the Costerian
                    Incunabula. London, 1871. 8vo.</span> which, while disposing ruthlessly of
                the fiction of Coster’s invention, lays down the important
                principle, too often neglected by writers on the subject,
                that the essence of Typography consists in the mobility of
                the types, and that, therefore, it is not a development of
                the long practised art of printing from fixed blocks, but
                an entirely distinct invention.
            </p>
    
            <p>The principle is so important, and Dr. Van der Linde’s words are so
                emphatic, that we make no apology for quoting them:―</p>
    
            <p>“I cannot repeat often enough that, when we speak of Typography and its
                invention, nothing is meant, or rather nothing must be meant, but printing with
                <em>loose</em> (separate, moveable) types (be they letters, musical notes, or other figures),
                which therefore, in distinction from letters cut on wooden or metal plates, may be
                put together or separated according to inclination. One thing therefore is certain:
                he who did not invent printing with moveable types, did, as far as Typography
                goes, invent nothing. What material was used first of all in this invention; of
                what metal the first letters, the patrices (engraved punches) and matrices were
                made; by whom and when the leaden matrices and brass patrices were replaced
                by brass matrices and steel patrices; .&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. all this belongs to the secondary
                question of the technical execution of the principal idea: multiplication of
                books by means of multiplication of letters, multiplication of letters by means
                of their durability, and repeated use of the same letters, <em>i.e.</em>, by means of the
                independence (looseness) of each individual letter (moveableness).”—P. 19.
            </p>
    
            <p>If this principle be adopted—and we can hardly imagine it questioned—it
                will be obvious that a large class of works which usually occupy a prominent
                place in inquiries into the origin of Printing, have but slight bearing on the
                history of Typography. The block books of the fifteenth century had little
                direct connection with the art that followed and eclipsed them.<span class="footnote" data-note="02"
                    id="note-02">Xylography did not become extinct
                    for more than half a
                    century after the invention of Typography. The last block book known
                    was printed in Venice in 1510.</span>
                In the one respect of marking the early use of printing for the instruction of mankind, the
                block books and the first works of Typography proper claim an equal interest;
                but, as regards their mechanical production, the one feature they possess in
                common is a quality shared also by the playing-cards,
                pictures, seals, stamps, brands, and all the other applications of the principle of impression which had
                existed in one form or another from time immemorial.</p>
        </section>
    
        <section class="chapter">
            <h1>Chapter 2</h1>
    
            <p>This testimony proves nothing beyond the fact that at Strasburg, Venice,
                and Mentz there existed at some time or other certain perforated wooden types
                which tradition ascribed to the first printers. But on the question whether any
                book was ever printed with such type, it is wholly inconclusive. It is possible
                to believe that certain early printers, uninitiated into the mystery of the punch and
                matrix, may have attempted to cut themselves wooden types, which, when they
                proved untractable under the press, they perforated and
                strung together in lines; but it is beyond credit that any such rude experiment ever resulted in the
                production
                of a work like the <em>Speculum</em>.</p>
    
            <p>It is true that many writers have asserted it was so. Fournier, a practical
                typographer, insists upon it from the fact that the letters vary among themselves
                in a manner which would not be the case had they been cast from a matrix in a
                mould. But, to be consistent, Fournier is compelled (as Bernard points out)
                to postpone the use of cast type till after the Gutenberg <em>Bible</em> and Mentz <em>Psalter</em>,
                both of which works display the same irregularities. And as the latest edition
                of the <em>Psalter</em>, printed in the old types, appeared in 1516, it would be necessary
                to suppose that movable wood type was in vogue up to that date. No one has
                yet demonstrated, or attempted seriously to demonstrate, the possibility of
                printing a book like the <em>Speculum</em> in movable wooden type. All the experiments
                hitherto made, even by the most ardent supporters of the theory, have
                been woful failures. Laborde<span class="footnote" data-note="09" id="note-09"><em>Débuts de l’ Imprimerie à
                        Strasbourg.</em> Paris, 1840, p.
                    72.</span>
                admits that to cut the 3,000 separate letters
                required for the <em>Letters of Indulgence</em>, engraved by him, would cost 450 francs;
                and even he, with the aid of modern tools to cut up his wooden cubes, can only
                show four widely spaced lines. Wetter<span class="footnote" data-note="10" id="note-10"><em>Erfindung der
                        Buchdruckerkunst.</em> Mainz, 1836. Album, tab.
                    ii.</span>
                shows a page printed from perforated
                and threaded wooden types<span class="footnote" data-note="11" id="note-11">The history of these “fatal,
                    unhistorical wooden types”
                    is worth recording for the warning of the over-credulous typographical
                    antiquary. Wetter, writing his book in 1836, and desirous to illustrate
                    the feasibility of the theory, “spent,” so Dr. Van der Linde writes,
                    “really the amount of ten shillings on having a number of letters made
                    of the wood of a pear-tree, only to please Trithemius, Bergellanus,
                    and Faust of Aschaffenburg. </span>; but these, though of large
                size, only prove by their “naughty caprioles” the absurdity of supposing that the “unleaded”
                <em>Speculum</em>,
                a quarternion of which would require 40,000 distinct letters, could have been
                produced in 1440 by a method which even the modern cutting and modern
                presswork of 1836 failed to adapt to a single page of large-sized print.
            </p>
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